The day before Thanksgiving in 2025, Sand Hill Property Company delivered a revised plan for The Rise, the 50-acre redevelopment rising on the former Vallco Mall site at Wolfe Road and Stevens Creek Boulevard, to Cupertino's city manager. The timing wasn't an accident. At a city council meeting afterward, Mayor Liang Chao pointed out that submitting major revisions right before a holiday week meant the required 60-day review would run through the exact period when public attention is thinnest. The revision itself cut the project's affordable housing by roughly 60 percent and its office space by about a quarter, changes the developer said were necessary to keep the project financially feasible.
If you've been watching Cupertino real estate and telling yourself that 2,669 new homes are eventually coming to loosen up this market, that filing is worth sitting with. The number hasn't changed. Almost everything else about how those homes arrive, who can buy them, and when, has.
A decade of revisions, one site
The Rise has been Cupertino's most contested piece of land for the better part of ten years, working through lawsuits, ballot referenda, and repeated trips back to the planning department since its original approval under California's SB 35 process in 2018. SB 35 is the state law that streamlines housing approvals in cities that haven't met their state-mandated housing targets, and it limits how much a city can push back once a project qualifies. Cupertino has needed to add 4,588 homes by 2031, including 1,880 designated affordable, and The Rise alone was expected to satisfy more than half of that obligation.
Here's what that obligation has looked like on paper across three checkpoints:
| Stage | When | Affordable units | Office space | Total homes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Council approval | February 2024 | 890 (cut by a third from the prior plan) | ~1.95M sq ft (down from ~1.98M) | 2,669 |
| Sand Hill's requested revision | Filed Nov. 26, 2025 | Cut roughly 60% | Cut roughly 25% | 2,669 |
| Third modification | Approved Feb. 27, 2026 | 356 | Reduced by ~500,000 sq ft, eliminating two office buildings | 2,669 |
The total homes figure is the one everybody quotes because it hasn't moved. Everything feeding into whether those homes get built, and who they're built for, has been renegotiated at least twice in two years. The city had limited ability to object to any of it, because SB 35 status was the whole reason this site could move as fast as it has.
What actually ships first, and when
The first phase to break ground, called Town Square West, is where the abstract 2,669 becomes concrete. It's set to deliver 1,369 units: 232 affordable family rentals, 744 market-rate rentals, and 393 for-sale homes, alongside 202,000 square feet of retail (nearly 90 percent of the whole project's retail footprint) and just over three acres of connected park space. Vertical construction is targeted for 2026. First occupancy, if the current schedule holds, is 2028.
Read that breakdown again with a buyer's eyes. Of the first 1,369 units to arrive, 976 are rentals. Only 393 will ever be available to purchase, and that's the number landing sometime in 2028, assuming the schedule doesn't slip a third time. A project that gets described in headlines as "2,669 homes" is, for anyone actually shopping to own, closer to a few hundred units arriving two years from now, in a plan that has already been trimmed twice under financial pressure.
The type of home this project can't touch
Here's the part that gets lost in every conversation about Vallco solving Cupertino's affordability problem: The Rise is entitled entirely as multifamily and attached housing. There is no detached single-family component in the plan. That matters enormously, because single-family homes are where Cupertino's scarcity is most extreme.
According to MLSListings data for June 2026, Cupertino had just 33 active single-family listings citywide, with a median sale price of $3,350,000, a median of 14 days on market, and homes selling at 104 percent of asking price on average. Months of inventory sat at 1.7, well below the four to six months that typically defines a balanced market. No amount of construction at Wolfe and Stevens Creek changes any of that math, because nothing being built there is a single-family home. If you're competing for a detached house in Cupertino, The Rise is simply not part of the supply equation you're working with, now or in 2028.
Where the new supply actually lands
The lane The Rise does affect is condos and townhomes, and that lane is already behaving differently than the single-family market. The same June 2026 MLSListings report put the condo and townhome median sale price at $1,310,000, with a median of 36 days on market, more than double the single-family figure, and just 6 closed sales that month against 23 active listings. It's still a competitive segment, but it moves at a noticeably slower pace, with more room for a buyer to negotiate than the single-family side allows.
That's the segment where 393 new for-sale homes will eventually compete for buyers, sometime after 2028. Whether that supply meaningfully changes pricing in the attached-home lane depends on how many other Cupertino condo owners are listing at the same time, what mortgage rates look like by then, and whether the fourth phase of this project follows the pattern of the first three: same headline home count, shrinking substance underneath it.
What this means if you're deciding whether to wait
If your search is centered on a single-family home in Cupertino, waiting for The Rise doesn't change your position at all. It was never going to. The scarcity driving today's 1.7 months of inventory and 14-day sale cycle is a detached-housing story, and this project is a multifamily one.
If you're specifically weighing a condo or townhome and wondering whether new for-sale inventory in a few years is worth waiting for, the honest read is that it's a real but distant and already-shrunk piece of the picture. Three hundred ninety-three homes citywide isn't nothing, but it isn't the kind of supply shock that resets pricing either, especially arriving into a market that, by 2028, will have had two more years to move on its own. And given that this project's affordable count alone has been cut from an original higher figure to 890 to 356 across successive filings, treating any current projection as a fixed outcome would be its own kind of risk.
The more useful question isn't whether to wait for Vallco. It's whether the home you actually want, whether that's a detached house in a specific area or an attached property with a shorter commute, exists in a segment this project touches at all.
FAQ
Will The Rise lower home prices in Cupertino? Not for single-family homes, since none are part of the project. For condos and townhomes, a few hundred for-sale units arriving around 2028 could add some competition in that specific segment, but the project's own history of shrinking its affordable and office components suggests the final numbers may look different from what's on paper today.
When can someone actually buy a home at The Rise? The earliest for-sale units, 393 of them in the Town Square West phase, are targeted for occupancy in 2028, assuming vertical construction proceeds on the 2026 schedule the developer has given the city.
If you're trying to figure out which segment of Cupertino's market actually matches what you're looking for, whether that's a single-family home unaffected by any of this, or an attached property that might see new competition down the line, Clara Lee can walk through what's realistic for your timeline and budget. Reach out for a free home valuation to start with a clear picture of where you stand today.
